Pilots

The SIMPATICO activate of three pilots, one in Trento, one in Galicia region, and one in Sheffield. The stakeholders engaged in the three use-cases are selected for their experience and interest in e- services, as well as for the different socio-cultural backgrounds of the three regions.

In this way, we have the opportunity to validate the effectiveness of the project results in contexts which differ on the number and heterogeneity of citizens and their social and cultural background.

Trento has already done much to improve interactions with its citizens. The city website is an important reference for citizens and contains all relevant information on the city services. Each procedure has its web page with:

a description of the procedure;

links to the PDF version of all relevant laws and regulations (national and local);

a step-by-step description of the interaction, with waiting times, costs, and documentation needed;

links to the application documents: all documents are fillable PDF documents.

Also, the Municipality of Trento already supports submitting applications through certified e-mail, by sending the filled application documents and a scan of identity document and signature.

As part of its “smart city” strategy, Trento is working to realize a new e-service portal: it will serve as a “one-stop shop” or unique access point that offers integrated and facilitated access to all the various services. With this new portal, it will be possible for citizens and businesses to authenticate using smart service cards or one-time password devices, and to complete the interaction online.

The first phase of the “e-service portal” project aims at the digitalization of the procedures within three different domains:

Childcare services: enrolment to day nursery service;

Private Building: landscape permit and mandatory opinions on the architectural quality of the interventions;

The services in the three different domains described above will be ready between September 2016 and December 2016. Together, they will cover needs of different stakeholders, ranging from citizen to professionals, and offer an important test-bed for the whole “e-service portal” project.

SIMPATICO will inject interaction simplification techniques to the provided e-service which will be tested and evaluated on a production environment.

The socioeconomic indicators for Galicia show a number of particular needs that make it especially suited for e-services improvement. Among these are:

• A sparse distribution of the population, especially in the rural centre of the region, where people often migrate to the richer coastal areas and other Spanish regions. This has resulted in large rural areas with a low population density, where the access to public services is harder.

• An aging population: Galicia is third from bottom in Spain in aging perspectives as noted by the EU (just 1,1 children per woman compared to the 1,4 average in Spain, while the zero growth threshold is 2,1). Latest data also show a big gap in the use of e-services in the Galicia region between the segment of population older than 55 with respect to rest of people: while 66.63% of the people between 30 and 39 years has used e-services during the last year, this rate is only 13.81% for people older than 55 years.

Although a significant volume of information is openly available on the Council’s website (http://www.sheffield.gov.uk/ ), current interactions between migrants and Sheffield City Council are mostly done in person or over the phone. The reasons behind this fact include the lack of personalised content online, e.g. for migrants from specific countries or in particular cases, based on previous interactions; the migrants’ inexperience with the UK system and lack of knowledge of the English language; the perception and lack of trust from migrants regarding providing information into online forms; the inherent complexities of the processes, particularly in cases requiring long term engagement with the migrants. The volume of face-to-face/phone interactions with citizens whose native language is not English, and thus requiring interpretation or translation, is very high. This option was used by 1500 citizens in 2014 alone, resulting in enormous costs to the Council: in 2014, the costs with translation and interpretation exceeded 386,000 Euros. In addition, the need to rely on human interpreters and translators severely delays the interaction process.

Support and advice for issues concerning children of migrants living in the UK thus present several complexity factors and potential benefits that makes this an ideal use-case for SIMPATICO.

Components

Text adaptation

SIMPATICO learns from interactions with users what their needs are and, among different simplification possibilities, find the ones that best suits a specific users, or induce novel forms of simplification if the existing ones are not adequate. These new strategies will combine standard adaptation rules with information automatically leveraged through user interactions (e.g. logs), information provided by civil servants and knowledge provided by citizens. This user-centred self-evolving approach will consider user profiles, exploit rich linguistic information, provide advanced machine learning to allow self-adjustment, initiating a new research direction in the field of text adaptation.

Information extraction and text analysis

This project applies state of the art text processing techniques to perform adaptations in order to cope with specific characteristics of public service contents. Traditional NER are extended to recognize additional entities, e.g. laws, official documents and norms. Besides, user comments are likely to be highly informal in structure and vocabulary. Text clustering will be used for organization and classification of final user comments and opinions.

Citizen data vaults

SIMPATICO tackles interoperability, network latency, data availability and security issues impeding a more widespread adoption of CDVs. It will address the perceived liability for public entities which fail to deliver services because of the absence of data vault services. Its CDV enables citizens to use it as a single point of access to their data when interacting with the public administration. It is composed of personal information items fed by authorized data sources (e.g. civil registry) and supplied automatically by the CDV to the open services consumed by citizens.

Advanced information search and recommendation mechanisms

In order to improve user experience whilst consuming e-services, SIMPATICO is powered with advanced search/recommendation mechanisms that will take into account the context, i.e. the area of the page and specific contents that the user is currently looking at, the user’s profile and his/her previous interactions with the system.

Human computation

SIMPATICO fosters citizens’ involvement, by providing Citizenpedia, a hybrid of Wikipedia and a collaborative question answering engine, and sharing improvements on public resources in a semi-automatic basis. Public servants are able to moderate comments and suggestions of citizenships to prevent crowd’s wisdom bias. An award mechanism that engages users and incentivize them to collaborate by giving them reputation (a valuable asset for professionals and organizations) and privileges is designed.

Browser extensions

This project creates a cross-browser extension which enables users accessing to e-services to leverage from the adaptation and collective intelligence properties provided by SIMPATICO. The novelty is in the creation of an extension for enhancing accessibility and democratizing access to legacy e-services by personalizing the content and workflows of the webpages supporting an e-service through the interaction with SIMPATICO back-end.

Process design

The Collective knowledge gathered with the use of the platform (user annotations, questions & answers in the Citizenpedia, logs, user profiles in the Citizens data vault), fosters two alternative process management approaches that can be adopted depending on whether the knowledge is well structured or not. SIMPATICO will adopt an ACM process design notation when the knowledge does not show a clear structure, whilst a BPM notation will be preferred.